many times, I’ve threatened to come up with a hatching chick ice sculpture design as one of my Easter options. This year, I finally did it!
I haven’t updated this yet, but I don’t think I’m quite finished with this post. You might think it’s plenty long enough already though 🤪
finally: a hatching chick ice sculpture design
Pretty much every year since I’ve been sculpting ice for Easter brunches, I’ve wanted to come up with some version of a hatching chick ice sculpture. Oftentimes, I’d start on the design, get stuck, and then just end up making a rabbit. I don’t know why I had trouble with this one.
I’d decided long ago that there are two ways to go with a hatching chick ice sculpture: flat or 3Dish. I opted for the flat version since it takes less ice, is MUCH easier to move, and is a lot more CNC-friendly. I might try a three dimensional version of this design someday, but in this case I was looking for something that I could create and recreate, year after year. I mean, I’m not going for great art with an Easter brunch sculpture 🙄
Also, there are two looks I could give my hatching chick ice sculpture: realistic and cartoony. Since I’d already opted for flat, then cartoonish is an easy choice. After all, cartoons are mostly flat already. Plus, then it’s easier to make it cute. Cute is always an excellent choice for Easter.
the hatching chick ice sculpture design and templates
A lot of the time, I tend to go off on some tangent before I get to what you came for, the designs. This time, I saved the tangents for later (see below). Here’s the design!
you can color your hatching chick ice sculpture however you want. I like this combo though and it corresponds nicely to the color sand options that I have.
similar to my egg bunny, I did this sculpture as long lasting ice sandwich, where I reverse engraved all the detail and then covered the engraving with a back slab of ice to encase all the detail in the middle of the sculpture. I started with a front slab that was about 2.5″ thick and a back slab that was 2″ thick. You DON’T have to do it this way though! You could also either do a standard reverse engraved colorfill piece OR you could do a front engraved snowfill only piece with no color.
one of the fractures that made scary pop noises after I took this hatching chick ice sculpture out of the freezer (highlighted in red)
one problem with the sandwich technique
For my other new Easter design, the egg bunny, I elected to talk about how to freeze almost all your sculpture detail inside your sculpture. With this hatching chick ice sculpture design, I’m going to talk about something else. It’s a bit less complicated, fortunately, because we’re all getting pretty bored 🥱
Look, I’ve frozen a lot of pieces of ice together in my ice sculpting career. I’ve casually delivered ice sculptures that were composed of 10 or more pieces of ice, all frozen together. I will say though, that some welds are a bit more troublesome than others. The sandwich technique, that I talk about extensively with the egg bunny, is apparently one of the troublemakers.
Now I didn’t have anything catastrophic happen. But holy 💩, when I had both an egg bunny and a hatching chick sculpture sitting outside the freezer so that I could clean them up, they made a LOT of noise!
One of the most unpleasant noises that an ice sculptor hears is a fracture pop. As soon as they hear it, they know what happened. While they’re looking, they’re kinda praying: Please, don’t let it be a big, bad fracture!
Sometimes, the worst case happens and you get a big fracture that compromises the whole sculpture. Most of the time though, the pops you hear are little, incidental fractures. Thankfully, that’s what was going on with egg bunny and hatching chick. Between the two of them though, they were giving Rice Krispies a run.
When I heard what was going on, I quickly put bags over the sculptures to lessen the temperature stress. As it turned out, all of the fractures that I heard were right along the freeze edges of the sculptures.
That was fine. I’m definitely going to see them, but probably nobody else will unless I point them out (I’ve done that, multiple times 🤦♂️) They’re all also small fractures, all along the edge of the sculpture. And actually, with two egg-based designs, small cracks aren’t really a problem. I’d already added some engraved cracks to this design.
Now I don’t know if the popping that I heard would actually lead to a devastating major fracture. I don’t think so. I do believe it’s possible that the ice sandwich I made could pop apart; I’ve heard of that happening with this sort of laminated sculpture. That’s why the base is important to hold things together. However, since this sculpture was for a freezer-drop delivery, I did make sure to tell my client to give the sculpture extra time to temper.
here’s my new hatching chick ice sculpture, hanging out with another new design, the egg bunny. They’re almost done and ready to be delivered.
working with cartoon eyes
Cartoon eyes are not as easy to do properly as they would seem. I think I mostly got these ones right, but that’s not always been the case. If you do them wrong, your ice sculpture can look creepy, possibly stoned, or deranged. For my hatching chick ice sculpture, I think we just get caffeinated. I suppose that’s unusual for a baby that just hatched, but chicks probably don’t often wave either.
The basic composition of cartoon eyes is mostly just like regular eyes: pupil, iris, and sclera (the white part). There are a few other parts too, that aren’t technically part of the eye, but really affect the message that your cartoon eyes are sending: eyebrows, eyelids, and highlights.
For my chick, I skipped the eyebrows, partly since the eggshell and the eyebrows might not play well together and partly because I was having trouble envisioning a chick with eyebrows. But for many cartoonish designs, eyebrows are crucial to help convey the expression you’re going for.
My chick’s eyelids are barely there; they’ve been simplified almost into nothingness. The best evidence of the remaining eyelids is actually in the bottom parts of the eyes, where the lower eyelids add curves that follow the shape of the beak. You’ll see in many cartoon eyes that the only remnant of eyelids is in the overall shape of the character’s eyes. But eye shape has a big effect on expression, so eyelids are very important!
Finally, highlights are surprisingly important and I did include them in this design. Since I don’t have a formal art background and am (still) kind of learning as I go, I didn’t really get the importance of highlights in the eyes until relatively recently. I’m going to credit renowned pumpkin sculptor Ray Villafane for demonstrating to me their importance via his fantastic pumpkin sculptures.
Basically, highlights are external light sources reflecting in the pupil and iris. They can show up in the sclera too, but they don’t have the same impact there since the sclera is already mostly white anyway. Eyes without highlights often have a bit of a dead look. If you want your sculptures to look more lively and convey emotion, then you need highlights. This even applies to realistic ice sculptures, by the way!
At some point in the future, I may do a full post just on cartoon eyes, since it’s a much more complex topic than can be covered in a few paragraphs. I’m sure that in my research for the post, I’d learn a ton as well. In the meantime, take a look at this post on cartoon eye formulas from Luis Escobar.
CNC friendly? absolutely!
As I mentioned earlier, my hatching chick was designed for the CNC. At a later date, I might even provide a .pdf file so that you get all the vectors! I’m still trying to decide how/if that would work.
links and stuff
This hatching chick ice sculpture design is one of many Easter designs on ice sculpting secrets. I’ve already mentioned the new egg bunny design and there are also several other Easter Bunny designs, like the bunny and basket… I hope to keep adding more Easter designs in the future as I continue to restore and expand the site. I have many existing ice sculpture designs, just not ones that I’m ready to show you. It takes a bit to get them ready for the site. Plus, you might have noticed that I like to write a lot of other crap 💩 to go along with them, and that takes TIME ⏰
Check out the design page for many more ice sculpture designs. Also, check out the design usage guidelines to see what uses are permitted.
You could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. ice sculpting secrets is also on TikTok (sort of, so far, lol), although videos there aren’t really tied to posts as much. You can comment on IG and fb as well as below. And if it won’t LET you comment below, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
